Page 429 - Class Warfare

Author Notes:

Guest Author’s Note: "Loosely inspired by the Halo HeroClix line from years ago.

"As Yogi Berra once said, 'It ain't over 'til it's over.' Until your entire team is dead, there's always that one-in-a-million chance that you can turn things around and come out smelling like roses. Story Time today is tell us about last-minute saves."

Newbiespud's Note: As an alternate Story Time (2 for 1 today!), tell a story about "buyer's remorse" - a feat choice or class feature that someone else got that made you want it, or one that you got and regretted later.

Eh, a few years agos, my group were playing Eberron. At some point, one of the player of the group, in-between two adventures, said he want to buy a horse. And he want it right now, no waiting for the next day, so he keep pestering the DM about visiting every shop he can find that might sell horses, until the DM, out of having enough of this, tells him he manages to find a shop, then buy his damn horses. Next to what, the player announces that he get on his horse, then start parading proudly all around the city, waving at the people like a knight or a king.

To what the DM replied "You do realise you're in the city of STAIRS, right ? Your horse won't be able to get in the city, there are stairs everywhere."

It took us around half an hour to stop laughing and manage to get on with the game. And after that, we mostly travelled using either ships, train or teleport spell. XD

I had a character level up right before one of Paizo's big multi-table events and felt my sorcerer was a little lacking in attack power, so I bought a Wand of Fireballs and took the Burning Palms spell.

Then I find out that practically every enemy in the campaign is immune to fire spells and the one that wasn't was fought in such close quarters that using the wand would've been more likely to cause a TPK than kill the enemy.

Ugh, I hate that. I've had a character who bought a flamethrower to fight some undead and learned too late that these creatures had such a high tolerance to fire that they were getting bonus damage to body-slam us. :p

On the other side of the coin, I once managed to lob a live grenade into a closing elevator that had a werewolf inside it. The blast by itself would hurt, but most werewolves we fought would survive the explosion. THIS TIME the werewolf was in an enclosed metal box where the blastwave couldn't escape the confines of the elevator. Chunky Salsa indeed!

To be fair, it's an interesting question. Perhaps it could just be a thread on username origins?
Mind's just something I improvised when I noticed there was already another Colin commenting - I saw a "Luna's Loyal Subject," was reminded of an overly angsty OC of mine who absolutely hates Celestia, but tends to agree with her, leading to borderline tsundere behavior, and voila.

You know, if you wanted to interview us, you could always just interview us. So, I'll actually give you this one question.

My current username comes from the way I sign my real initials. A combination of lines forms what can be interpreted as a pair of crosses. It's somewhat helpful for reading it that 'double-cross' is an actual word, though its meaning is not being taken seriously.

My old username was a jumble of stuff I made up as a 12- or 13-year-old that I used for a long, long time, but then I started reading about cultural appropriation and in particular a long, long post about nikkeijin and realised, yeah, having a Japanese word for a username when I'm not Japanese was not really a good idea.

Mine was an intentionally misspelled parody of stereotypical "intimidating" gamer names, like XxDarkDestroyerxX or DeAtHlOrDoFdArKnEsS.
I came up with it on the fly when I first began playing halo 2 and was prompted to choose a profile name. It stuck with me ever since.

One of my friends was writing a story and basing the characters on people he knew. When he asked me to come up with a name for my alter ego, my mind drifted to Europe then Euric. Turns out its an ancient European name, lol.

I ended up using it for my improv class name, and it was the first thing that came to mind for a username

Last Minute Saves?
It was an Earthdawn game and I was a T'skrang swordmaster. The party was exploring a ruin and down below we get ambushed by the undead. A lot of undead. I'm talking "Cue Jackson's Thriller Theme" mob of undead. We fought valiently, but the party was quickly taken down except for me and one of the mages. I quickly had the mage back up to the stairs while I got the undead to surround me at the base of the stairwell. The mage continued to shot bolts at whatever undead was closest up the stairs while I just wailed on the others around me. The mounting bodies of slain undead piled up and bottlenecked the undead to where we managed to finish them all off! We then did just a qucik cursory looting before we dragged the rest of the team out and to a healer (paid for by the found loot). The mage and I leveled up that day and became best buds.

Buyer's Remorse?
I can't remember a time I personally had it, but my local group all have had such experiences. The silliest case of Buyer's Remorse was because of treasure they got after slaying a black dragon in a swamp temple. They all found some nice magical weapons, but after several battles none of them liked what they were using, yet they liked what each other had. They started taking downtime calculating what they'd have to sell just to get similar weapons to what each other had. I interrupted them and asky why they didn't just trade with each other?

I, as probably everybody else, have many stories about a roll that was highly unlikely but saved the day. But the most memorable was one time when I saved whole team from certain doom that I initiated at the first place in the span of 5 irl minutes. I normally play calm and planning characters. I have plans, contingencies I don't act recklessly. And when I was creating my character in 7th sea I decided to take hyper-bad disadvantage. Nothing out of ordinary - every character could take one from the list like arrogant or cowardly. But GM insisted I have to take one at random and I've got reckless. I decided to milk it for all it was worth and for the most part everybody was happy -everything was going faster without me constantly pausing for "thinking time". And there was finale of our second adventure. 7th sea is XVII century with magic for swashbuckling heroes. I was playing Spaniard noble who secretly had fire magics. We were in hospital after the battle - we were good but many NPCs were badly wounded. Suddenly villain from pseudo-france teleported with his henchmen mage inside with fuse grande in hand and demanded maggufin or else he will blow up wounded and us. I said "So you will light up this fuse unless we do as you demand". He nodded. I light up a fuse with my magic (revealing it for the first time). "Ok - what is next step of your master plan?". His teleporting wizard panicked and started to create portal to escape and villain was in shock as the rest of the party. And here came mechanics. GM secretly makes a role (but the dice is under cup, so he couldn't manipulate it). in which of 10 phases of the turn the grande will explode, killing almost everybody. I rolled 3 dices to see in which phases I act - I've got 2,4 and 5. First I shot teleporting mage with the pistol. Then I punch villain and catch falling grenade. In the 5th I stop the fuse. And the grenade was to explode in the 6th. To this day, I've ban on playing reckless characters. Almost destroyed whole campagin. Good times...

This doubles for buyers remorse - for the GM for making me take reckless...

I guess reckless is inherent with my players. Seems most of the time when they try to sit down to plan their attack, half the party gets bored and charges into the fray (with explosives when available).

@Specter & @you know that guy
Thanks. I normally would try to negotiate or use formulate some plan, maybe distract him. I'm actually grateful to my GM - thanks to him I learned that planning is fun, but once in a while you should go with your instincts and enjoy yourself.

As a [casual] fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball team, I have a soft spot for epic last-minute saves.
I believe I've mentioned my Orcish healer's bloodthirsty charge to gib the kobold that just stuck my half-drow wizard buddy, intimidate the rest of the kobolds into staring slack-jawed at me while I screamed at them, covered in gore, and then grabbed the wizard and WALKED out. And the time the same group's warblade bisected a bandit archer who'd gotten the rest of us under his mercy. Both Nat 20s at the best possible times.
So instead, today I'll tell a story from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. We're rank-and-file stormtroopers guarding a middle-of-nowhere secret research facility hidden in an asteroid field. There's 200 troops and I dunno how many scientists on the station. We get attacked by the Rebel Alliance. There's rebels running everywhere, shooting guys; stormtroopers shooting back, officers either doing the same or cowering with the scientists, grenades all over... We try to hold choke points, and when we inevitably have to fall back, we use our prior knowledge of the station (a detailed map) to circle around and hit them where it hurts. Even so, the party dwindles - Wookies wipe out a defensive emplacement, a Bothan comes out of nowhere to backstab one of us... best death any of us got was 2 guys who hijacked one of the tanks the rebels brought. After it was too damaged for the engie (me) to keep up, they charged into a landing bay that had 3 more in it and blew everyone there up. They gave me their rifles first, though, and... last man standing, versus another 130 rebels. (I guess the GM wanted us to lose; it was a one-shot.) I holed up in a hangar, fiddled with comms to lure rebels to me, and occasionally jacked a tank briefly (it's less effective without a gunner and engineer.) There were a few close calls, but lots of bacta and luck saved my sorry hide, and I won. Not a single rebel left alive on the base, and lots of incriminating evidence on their ships and equipment of who was backing them. For the Empire!

Well, at least 2/3 of the invading force were dead by the time I was the only one left, but it was still pretty crazy. The NPC troopers were a big help while they lasted; one stuck with me even after my last teammate was dead, but we were found by 3 rebels at once from different directions while on the way to the place I planned to make my stand (they couldn't get tanks into it) and got headshotted.
Really, that whole game was a rollercoaster of narrow saves. I'm just lucky the research facility had so much medical crap I could jury-rig.
Things might've played out differently if their tanks didn't have rapid-fire rocket-launcher turrets, given that our armor helped a tiny bit against plain ol' blasters and grenades. Really, the grenades were only a problem if we got immobilized or stuck in a tight corridor.

We were toying with a homebrewed desiel punk pirate concept when part of the party got caught off guard in a port city by a rival crew. while the GM had the rival captain gloat, i rolled on Prowl and Pickpocket and slipped up behind him and drew his sidearm and took him hostage until we got to our ship. I even let him go at my captains request. no else thought to take any rouge skills, which bothi and the GM thought was funny because WE WERE PIRATES.

Mounted Combat. This was back when we were still starting out and I haven't realize what I could do with feats if I got created. It sounded like fun at the time, it could add variety to combat and make for some good role playing. I was a fighter at the time so I figured I could use a lance and liven up encounters. Every time I took that feat my mount died in the next combat encounter. Only one character had his mount make it through the campaign, Strun.

Strun was the Dragonborn Fighter I used because I wanted to focus on his breath weapon (lighting). His mount was either a hippogryph or a griffyn, I can't remember, and his name was Nuptup. He was quite helpful a number of times, particularly because the DM gave us a floating castle as a home base (we were level six at the time). But I did feel underwhelmed, all I wanted was one aerial combat, just one.

Same feat, different story. See, I took it with a druid. Did I mention this was my first Pathfinder game? In any case, the druid in question was a halfling who wielded a scythe, and I planned to ride my wolf companion Romulus around like the Shoeless Horseless Horseman.

Sadly, the DM rules that because my companion wasn't trained for riding, I wasn't allowed to do that. By the time I was able to train Romulus for the task, I was already fourth level, which meant I was getting more mileage out of wild shape than wolfing my opponents' wolves before my wolf could get wolfed.

A good way to get into a state of pure wolfness, would be that you shall wolf the wolf until the wolfing wolf wolfs. Then, when the wolf wolfs your wolfness, the wolves of the wild will wolf your wolf up. Wolf!

Not exactly a save, but in the session I ran last night the cavern the party went Into managed to bring two of them to EXACTLY zero HP (they are level one, so one point more would have killed them) and the third to one hit point. Since they are level one, the cleric only had one healing spell, so they ended up dragging the fighter out semi-conscious.

I was playing green, and was losing for sure, as I was left with a single soldier in one country section in North America. One of my opponents - who enjoyed overkill - moved a massive force of tanks, horsemen, and troops at me. Everyone around the table was certain I'd lose.

After a long sequence of unbelievable rolls, my lone soldier was left standing, and the entire enemy force - which belonged to the player in control of Europe - was wiped out.

One of the other players - who had a humorous disposition and was good at quick small art - promptly drew a tiny Risk soldier sized vest with the American flag on it, placed it on said soldier, and proclaimed him to be Captain America.

From that lone soldier, I then went on to win the game. None of us took the game seriously after that.

This actually happened just a couple of months ago and we thought we were screwed.

Our party had to take out a witness who'd seen one of our allies involved in some shady dealings that would have required us to be fugitives. Well we kinda got screwed up and captured. They were going to kill us once they found out who we were working for. Well my Ninja had plunked a lot of points into Escape Artist, managed to free herself, set the building on fire and during the chaos picked off the target and saved the party. Unfortunately we'd all been unmasked so while I got THE target we then had seven new witnesses and ended up fleeing. . .and we're living in constant fear because the Butler is apparently Walter C. Dolnaez and he's pissed I murdered Sir Integra. . .but we're dealing.

I usually only get buyers remorse when it comes to spell selection when I'm playing a caster. "Oh that spell would have been perfect here." or "If only I knew how to do that one spell we'd win here and now!" It's the main reason I play clerics, they have access to the whole spell list and can exchange spells out for healing spells meaning I don't need to prepare them in advance.

When I play wizards I take craft wand and craft basic attacking spells like fireball, lining bolt, magic missile, etc. so I can save my slots for utility spells, and ones of those I wind up using often are next up on the wand list. If I can I try and craft eternal wands if the DM allows it: they never run out of magic, but can be used only three times per day. In my opinion if you need more than three fireballs a day, something has gone horribly wrong.

Hilarious Buyer's Remorse happened when the party's rogue/sorcerer traded out Feather Fall for Spider Climb. Used the latter spell to run up a wall and jump onto the back of a dragon as it took off. After successfully using a scroll of Improved Invisibility, the PC sneak-attacks the dragon in the eye. The dragon slams into the side of a mountain and falls to it's death with the PC. Crazy? No problem, the PC just has to use Feather Fall and...

Really? Because to me it looks like a demonstration of why class-based systems do not do sci-fi well. Those right here look more like pregen equipment packages than classes, and they pretty much should be equipment packages with the non-weapon class features as armor abilities.

Special mention goes to having a Soldier class in a game where everyone is a soldier.

Buyer's Remorse for Monks is pretty much the theme of Paizo's Ultimate Equipment.

Monks needed a less ridiculously overpriced way to get enhancement bonuses so UE has an item to enhance unarmed strikes at weapon prices that isn't compatible with Flurry and an armor enchantment that boosts unarmed strikes and grapple that can't go on bracers of armor.

We were running a level 20 campaign for a few weeks just for fun. We had the untouchable dwarvish fighter, his dwarvish bard queen, a heal spell with limbs cleric, a wizard-fighter combo, a rogue, and me an alchemist.

We had entered a giant tower and got ambushed by six level 20 npcs, (2 archers, 2 rogues, 2 fighters,) an efreeti fighter, and a Great Wyrm Red Dragon with about 20 levels of sorcerer or wizard. The healer/casters were in a group at the door, the melee people had engaged the npcs elsewhere, and the dragon opened up with a potshot in the air and flanking with his efreeti. My alchemist was also separated, dealing with a couple of the archers who were killing us.

The dragon stopped time, threw up some prismatic walls between me, the fighter, and the rogue and the rest of the party, and healed his closest follower. The party needed at least one round for crowd control and to recuperate or we would wipe.

So my Alchemist had used Twin form to create a full double of himself, fluid form to increase his reach, and had the wings discovery. The double had spent the previous turn moving and drawing out a bag in one hand and a small piece of black cloth in another...

My turn comes and the double flies to the top of the wall and as a free action reaches over it and drops the portable hole into the bag of holding XD. The black hole sucked the dragon and the clone into the Astral plane, and the dragon had to spend two rounds to heal and return, in which we killed the followers and regrouped to slaughter it in two rounds.

It's a trait called motherly love. Anything cute or childlike, I cannot harm, and there's a pretty high will save to resist running over and giving it love. Yes, even if it's demonic. In addition, if I fail my will save, I will protect the cute thing as if it were my own child. Whatever splat book I got it from said it was a flaw, and it gave some pretty good bonuses, including a barbarian like rage if the cute thing was killed, which I could use to dominate on the battlefield. GM ruled that it should be a trait, not a flaw, and took away the TWO feats that the flaw gave me. My character was now very, very broken, because he also decided that I can't have the mourning rage ability with it. So it went from being a very powerful, if dangerous, flaw, to an extremely dangerous trait that put the whole party at risk. At one point, the GM tossed in a bear cub after the party had stopped to make camp. We had to fight a bear. Then he ruled that the noise woke the rest of the bears in the cave, so we had to kill eight more while low on health and spells. And I had aggro from every single one.

Yeah. I will never use that flaw again.

Unless I can keep it as a flaw, intact. Then I might once again play Urist Kittenbearer, of the mantle of many pockets, containing my many beloved kittens and other assorted cute little pets in my pockets.

Absolutely! Badgers are awesome in a multitude of ways. Heck, I even have a fondness for cave spiders. But whenever I read the name 'Urist,' elephants register as a threat to be purged by lava for the next 48 hours or so.

I always wanted to read that thread. Thanks!
...great, now I'm actually craving carp. WASN'T TOMATO-AUGMENTED CHILI GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, STOMACH?
That makes me wonder, what might unicorn flesh taste like?
Apparently I hop from train to train of thought even more easily than usual when it's 40 minutes later than I thought.

This seems dumb to me, but I can't seem to comprehend reading stuff people post. it irks me that there are hundreds of stuff on the internet right now I want to read, and my brain simply doesn't want to. I am so glad I can at least distract it with work, music, and art.

Clearly, you are not sociopathic enough. In minecraft, I built a gigantic diamond farm that nets me somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred diamond blocks a day. And I built the whole thing fifty meters in the air with no ground access, and I encased it in obsidian.

Tekkit rocks, by the way. I net around 17,000 iron per hour, then I have that automatically turned into iron blocks. After that, every other eight iron blocks are used to a single gold block, and every other eight gold blocks are used to make a single diamond block.

And this is all thanks to 40+ villagers I have moved in two tiny tiny rooms. They are held hostage and forced to construct iron golems for me to kill and harvest the iron from the corpses.

I have a chicken farm where live chickens are dropped into blenders, and proccessed into solid blocks of raw meat product. And the whole thing is powered by the fires of hell!

I know biofuel is easier to get the proper amount of power from, but then the meat wouldn't be lightly seasoned with the eternally honey roasted souls of the forsaken.

Wait! I haven't told you about how I burned off the forests to strip mine resources all the way down to bedrock, or how I trapped a whole village of desert natives in pokeballs for forced breeding in dangerous cloning machines to populate my iron farms!

Or the way I completely drained ten chunks of lava from hell powering everything until I figured out how to make it respawn at a decent rate! Or how I travel to hell and murder all the natives to mine the rich resources available, slaughtering them all with my fist mounted railgun, buzzsaw gun, and megabuster, along with a shotgun if I start to get bored!

Also how I'm building a death wagon on the moon to genocide the natives into submission before they can steal our women!

And I pretty much do the same kinds of things in Dwarf Fortress, except with more boobytraps and menacing spikes. And intentionally becoming one of the cursed undead, so nothing can kill me. And forcibly recruiting soapmakers into my personal army in order to use them as weapon factories. See, you grab them, and pop a tooth out with your superhuman wrestling power. Then you throw that tooth at your enemies so hard their heads explode! Each follower provides the following: 32 teeth, ten fingers, ten toes, two feet, two legs, two hands, two arms, assorted bones and internal organs, a gwad, and a torso.

That's a lot of ammunition, not counting thr vomit, and the infinite blood which can be used to turn the seas into blood, thus killing all the sea monsters forever.

I lost my point. Has anybody seen it? It's probably near some broken railroad tracks and a wrecked train of thought.

When I ran a game not too long ago, the party was investigating a mysterious forest. The first time they went in, they were unprepared, as on player hadn't made it to the game, and they left one PC in town. So the two that were left tried to tackle was was supposed to be a challenging questline for four on their own. They did have the forethought to get a hireling warrior first. When they on the second fight they almost wiped. They were surrounded by skeletons and zombies, and the sorcerer went down. Then the wizard ran. This left the hireling standing over the unconscious body of the sorcere, fighting off six skeletons and two zombies alone. He managed to wear them down, and survived with one hit point remaining.
Then they returned to town. They bought some potions, got their other party member, and four more hirelings. The party was now eight strong: two level one warriors, two level two warriors, a level three warrior, the level two PCs, and the warlock. They went back into the forest. The encounters remaining wore them down, and slowly picked off hirelings. When they got to the center, they found an obelisk that was the cause of the undead. At this point, everyone was down some health, and only the level three warrior and a single level two warrior remained of the hirelings. They encounter two skeletal owlbears, and a shadow. The party goes into the final fight, and a few unlucky crits from the enemies turns the fight a bit sour. First, both warriors go down. Then the sorceror, and finally the warlock. There remains a single skeletal owlbear of the enemies. The only one left conscious was the second level wizard. He had no spells remaining, three hitpoints, and seven strength. Rather than run, he charges the enemy. He manages to hit, barely, and rolls max damage. Exactly enough to kill the enemy. The players still rate that as one of the best quests, and fights, that I've done in a long time.

I'm pretty carful with my builds, because I don't WANT to have stories of buyer's remorse. I do have occasional bits of envying others' abilities, but at the end of the day, I'll still use Barkskin for flavor, even though the arcanists' Mage Armor is better in every way that matters at low level. If ham is called for, there may be moments where I get to yell, "I REGRET NOTHING," as some sub-optimal element of my character kicks in. (As it happens, having a fly speed of 70 feet at 5th level is bad when the enemy use fear spells, and the healer can't keep up with you... made worse in that I was also controlling said healer.)

A few weeks ago in Pathfinder Society we where doing a dungeon with no healer in the party we only had Two lvl1 fighters, One lvl1 Gunslinger, One lvl1 Sorcerer, and myself as a lvl2 Monk. I can't remember what the campaign was called but, moss and fungus was involved inside of a library. Anyway we SOMEHOW managed to make it to the boss without dying and using up the three potions our DM mercifully gave us only for the Boss Fight to manage to down ALL of our characters(I now hate sorceress/rouges) except for our Sorcerer the Boss fight got a Nat 20 then our Gunslinger calls out for the Shirt-rule which allows for us to reroll the last dice that was rolled. Went from a nat 20 to a 12 while it still hit the Sorcerer it didn't kill him which allowed him to cast Acid Splash on this Metal Container which was controlling the boss.

What really annoyed me during that battle was that I kept telling the Gunslinger and Sorcerer to shoot the metal container since they where the only ones who could damage it :/ oh well such is life.

Because nearly the same thing happened to me when I did that adventure: no dedicated healer so the DM gave us free potions, nearly TPK'd by the boss, and one lucky Acid Splash winning the fight. As soon as I got handed my Chronicle sheet, I bought a Cure Light Wounds wand.

That was it our Sorcerer usually played as a Cleric and he figured he'd play as his Gnome Sorcerer and just use the wands with him. HOWEVER he forgot to give himself the skill Use Magic Device and since no one could heal we went to 0 hp OFTEN in that game. Funny enough though nobody actually went below 0 during that mission. It was kind of a good thing that he didn't play cleric too, even though his cleric could have done everything that quest asked for if it wasn't for Acid Splash we would never of beaten that boss.

I can only think of two cases off the top of my head where a choice I made directly turned sour... both in the AirGear game... the first one that popped into my head as a running joke for our group, where we would hand little stuffed plushes of our team mascot to 'enemies' we wanted to recruit, and I did that to the game's big bad, who had been one of the founding members of our team way back when we started the campaign. He got picked up by the manga's big bad and was being fed half-truths to bring out his gravity child abilities, and we were trying to get him to come back, since he was also on a team that was outright killing old groups. Anyway, my character, a fragile speedster, offers him a plush, expecting the usual, 'Oh, gosh let's be friends' thing we'd get from other teams, and he slaps it out of my hands and upped his rage, so, that was smart.
There was another time where my character was facing off against a strength build amazon, and I offer my hand for a handshake, and the amazon reaches out just as our team leader goes, "No, it's a trap!" and the DM reaches around and mimicks punching me with his other hand. And then refused to listen to reason when I start to argue, "You do realize I can almost reach the speed of light on foot, right? I should be able to dodge a human fist." 'Nope, no dodging, she has you right where she wants you.' and then wondered why my character was originally going to be a hell of a lot darker than she ended up.
I realized this part a couple of weeks ago, even though that particular game died years back, thanks to everyone going separate ways, but, my character was right on the verge of walking off the team, well, running, she didn't 'walk' for any reason because it was just insane to her that people were being killed over an old title in something that was supposed to be friendly competition. Before she joined the team, she was in track, as the team lead, and a multitude of other extra-curriculars, so, to be a part of something so seemingly unregulated was wearing on her nerves. Plus, the constantly ending up back in the hospital every other week was starting to get really old.

Toys? Someone's stealing my bit! ha ha.
I don't really have any last minute saves but I do have a halo story.
It was headhunter, on Reach, I was on a mongoose, I had picked up so many skulls I no longer had a number over my head just a star. I was driving as fast as I could to the goal with everyone shooting at me and a warthog on my tail. I would never had made it had it not been for my best friend providing sniper support from across the map

So we were playing a game of Dark Ages Vampire, and my friend is and Old Clan Tzim, meaning he gets a whole bunch of nifty blood magics. He was also the only high clan so he got picked on, a lot.

So, the story progresses and his supply lines get shut down, assets frozen, essentially snowed. Some ghouls and other vampires bust into the house and start tearing the place apart. My grel is kicking ass and the other two players are holding their own. Suddenly, a turn before my buddy does something wild, the gm looks to me and says, you smell napthline (early gas) fumes from upstairs. I sat there, and grimace as he lit his house on fire, which blew the fuck out of it. Literally, the PC's only survived the massive amounts of damage by quick thinking (I hid under what amounted to a stone bar using a dead body as a meat shield) or be getting real lucky and ending up outside the kill zone.

Buyers remorse, we had a Warblade in our 3.5 game. EVERYTHING he had made me want it. Don't know what they are? They are GM bane in a bottle.

A 4e campaign I was the DM of had a few of these. The PCs were like cockroaches. They managed to weave their way almost at random through a five story castle, between carefully planned out & randomly rolled guard patrols up to the BBEG's room in the tower, right as he was donning his regalia preparing to announce their demise to the local village. They rejoiced a little too soon at having caught him alone and unawares, as he had just finished equipping most of the magic loot I had intended to be used as treasure. A poorly thought out bluff gave away their Changeling as some kind of imposter. But most of the (presumed dead) party had the element of surprise hidden just downstairs. Unfortunately the Sorcerer blew all his best spells before the cleric and bard could weaken the boss' defenses, and the dice decided to make the PCs lives hell. The team was out of healing spell and had barely scratched the BBEG who at this point was just royally pissed at his incompetent minions. Only the Sorcerer and Cleric were left standing and severely weakened with no chance of victory and in a tower four stories high. When the Sorcerer thought of a way to save at least one party member. On his turn he grappled the Cleric and pulled her out the window. His plan was to try to use his own body as a cushion to soak up some of the her falling damage in addition to his own. I thought they had next to no chance even if one of them got out, but didn't object to him trying it. The fell out the window about forty or fifty feet (I don't remember exactly offhand, with checking the map.) The falling damage was almost nothing and both of the PCs were able to get up and run afterward. I gave it a fifty/fifty chance whether the BBEG would maim, torture and ransom the captured PCs or kill them outright. Greed won out, but I didn't roll for it or run the scene until after I knew what the other players were doing. They assumed the other PCs were bound to be dead, and used their very limited resources to teleport to a bigger city without a way back, hoping to recruit new members. Once they got there, they learned that there was powerful opposition to the BBEG who were willing to help but powerless to access his island stronghold. The Sorcerer made his Arcana check to remember the sigil sequence of a teleportation circle that was a part of the BBEG's deathtrap, (that earlier they walked right into, and somehow miraculously right back out of,) bringing a small army of low level human soldiers with them they stormed the castle the next morning and broke off from the fighting to rescue the prisoners. Then they accidentally made their way into the BBEG's armory and found a few magic items, that they should have gotten to a while earlier. The BBEG ended up escaping, completing another teleportation ritual one round before the PCs got to him and flubbing the Arcana check so it only stayed open one round. But the PCs when from a series of almost certain death situations to turn around and rout a powerful enemy from his stronghold and all make it out alive.